AutoRec: An Automated Recommender System

For example, NCF [8] takes user-item implicit feedback data as inputs for the rating prediction task; and DeepFM [6] leverages both numerical and categorical data for the CTR prediction task. However, high degree of specialization comes at the expense of model adaptability and tuning complexity. As recommendation tasks evolve over time and additional types of data are collected, the originally apt model can either become obsolete or require tremendous tuning efforts. So far, several pipelines for recommender systems, e.g., OpenRec [16] and SMORe [4], tried to address the adaptability issue via providing modular base blocks that can be selected according to the context of recommendation. Nevertheless, both determining the blocks to use and tuning the model parameters are not straightforward when facing new data and changing tasks. In order to bridge the gap, we present AutoRec, which aims to provide an end-to-end solution to automate model selection and hyperparameter tuning. While many AutoML libraries, such as Auto-Sklearn [5] and TPOT [12] have shown promising results in general-purpose machine learning tasks (e.g., regression and hyperparameter tuning) and